Book description
No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman
Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses
, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a
marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served
up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic
fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for
fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian
movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from
his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky
after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of
metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are
astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner. Salman Rushdie is the
author of eight novels, one collection of short stories, and four works
of non-fiction, and the co-editor of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing
. In 1993 Midnight's Children
was judged to be the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won
the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. The Moor's Last Sigh
won the Whitbread Prize in 1995, and the European Union's Aristeion
Prize for Literature in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
